6. Errors
in student writing increase with greater cognitive difficulty of the assignment.

The more
cognitively difficult the task, the more an examinee's sentence structure
breaks down (Schwalm, 1985; Williams).

"The
research points to a relationship between grammatical competence and a
writer's control over the ideas being expressed. Since each new course
immerses students in new, unfamiliar ideas, the quality of students' writing,
predictably, degenerates. Teachers can help counter this phenomenon by
building requirements for multiple drafts into their assignments so that
students can use early drafts to clarify their thinking" (Bean, p.
64).

7. Errors
often disappear in students' prose as they progress through multiple drafts.

8. Teachers
can expect to see sentence problems in first drafts and on essay exams.

9. Traditional
procedures for grading and marking student papers may exacerbate the problem.